Item - Warlock T16 2P Bonus (New) Conflagrate has a 20% chance to increase the critical strike chance of Immolate and Incinerate by 15%. Unstable Affliction critical hits have a 40% chance to increase all damaging effects of Malefic Grasp and Drain Soul by 30% for 10 sec. Soul Fire has a 20% chance to increase you and your pet's damage dealt by 20%.

Item - Warlock T16 4P Bonus (New) When a Burning Ember fills up, your critical strike chance is increased by 15% for 5 sec. Haunt has a 20% chance to refund its shard when expiring. Shadow Bolt and Touch of Chaos have a 20% chance to also cast Hand of Gul'dan at the target.

Got a few updates for you guys. Standard disclaimer applies that this is all still in early testing and subject to change.

Fel Flame has gotten a slight rework. It now has a 1.5 second cast time, but can always be cast while moving. Also, it no longer extends the duration of damage over time effects (and, as such, no longer causes them to lose their "snapshotted" stats) and has gotten a small damage buff. The intent here is that you should be able to use this to keep up some damage when you need to move, but you'll want to stick to your standard rotation otherwise.

Looking specifically at Affliction, we're lowering the bonus damage that Malefic Grasp provides and moving that damage over into Haunt and the DoT effects themselves to compensate. We still want Malefic Grasp to be your primary filler for single target DPS, but this will make it a bit less punishing when you can't afford to channel it (especially in PvP). Haunt will once again be interrupted by movement, in favor of the Fel Flame change.

There's been a couple adjustments to the level 90 talents as well. Both Kil'Jaeden's Cunning and Mannoroth's Fury have had their cooldowns and durations lowered to 60 and 10 seconds, respectively. Mannoroth's Fury now only applies to the core AoE damage spells (Seed of Corruption, Hellfire, Immolation Aura, and Rain of Fire), but increases their damage by 100% while active in addition to the range increase. Note that Rain of Fire is being changed to no longer generate enough Burning Embers to be worth using in a single target rotation (so, Destruction shouldn't feel forced into Mannoroth's Fury).

These should hopefully be hitting the PTR in the next build. Once again, please remember that we're very early in the 5.4 development process. Any or all of this may still change before the patch goes live.

We're going to try keeping Fel Flame as an instant, slightly buffed, with no DoT refeshing. Intent wasn't to nerf Fel Flame on top of nerfing Kil'Jaeden's Cunning. As long as locks don't become backpedaling Fel Flame spamming machines, we think this change should work.

In a future PTR build, Kil'Jaeden's Cunning will once again be a passive effect. Selecting it will allow the Warlock to cast Malefic Grasp, Shadow Bolt, and Incinerate while moving. There is no penalty, so you'll be able to move at full speed.

Voidwalker: Suffering Grants your Voidwalker the ability to cast Suffering. The Voidwalker taunts the target to attack it, but has no effect if the target is already attacking the Voidwalkerand increases threat that it generates against the target by 200% for 5 sec. Auto-Cast: Taunts the current target if it is not attacking the Voidwalker and taunts any target who attacks its master. (Right-Click to toggle) Passive.

Item - Warlock T16 2P BonusConflagrate hasConflagrate critical strikes have a 20% chance to increase the critical strike chance of Immolate and Incinerate by 15%. Unstable Affliction critical hits have a 40% chance to increase all damaging effects of Malefic Grasp and Drain Soul by 30% for 10 sec. Soul Fire has a 20% chance to increase you and your pet's damage dealt by 20%.

Item - Warlock T16 4P Bonus When a Burning Ember fills up, your critical strike chance is increased by 15% for 5 sec. Haunt has a 20%8% chance to refund its shard when expiring. Shadow Bolt and Touch of Chaos have a 20%8% chance to also cast Hand of Gul'dan at the target.

The debuff from using a Demonic Gateway has been increased to 60 seconds (up from 15 seconds).

Fel Flame now deals 13% more damage, costs 2% less mana, and no longer increases the duration of damage-over-time spells.

Rain of Fire now has a reduced chance to generate Burning Embers.

Talents

Kil'jaden's Cunning no longer reduces movement speed, and will now allow the Warlock to cast Incinerate, Malefic Grasp, and Shadow Bolt while moving. is no longer a passive ability. Kil'jaden's Cunning now has a duration of 15 seconds with a 1.5 minute cooldown.

Mannoroth's Fury is no longer a passive ability. Mannoroth's Fury now has a duration of 10 seconds with a 60 second cooldown, and increases the area of area-of-effect by 500% and increases damage by 100% for Hellfire, Immolation Aura, Rain of Fire, and Seed of Corruption.

Soul Leech can now also activate from Shadowburn, and caps out at 15% of the Warlock and their pet's maximum health (down from 100%).

Archimonde's Vengeance has been redesigned. For the passive portion of the talent, each time the Warlock or their pet takes damage, the Warlock now gains 1% of the unmitigated damage back as spell power for 20 seconds.

Glyphs

Glyph of Everlasting Affliction will be redesigned.

Glyph of Soul Swap will be redesigned.

Affliction

Agony now deals 5% more damage.

Drain Soul now deals 40% less damage, and if other periodic Affliction damage effects are triggered by Drain Soul, they now deal 60% of their normal damage (down from 100%).

Haunt now deals 50% more damage, and increases damage done by all of the Warlock's other spells against the target by 45%.

Malefic Grasp now deals 40% less damage, and causes all of of the Warlock's other periodic Affliction damage effects to instantly deal 30% of their normal periodic damage (down from 50%).

Nightfall now gives Corruption a 7% chance to generate a Soul Shard (up from a 5% chance), but the increased chance only works on the most recently applied Corruption.

Soul Swap no longer does any damage, and now copies damage-over-time effects instead of just moving them without needing a glyph. Copied effects now once again preserve their power and duration. Duration has been reduced to 6 seconds (down from 20 seconds).

Archimonde's Vengeance has been further adjusted, as you'll see in a forthcoming PTR build. We agree with the general concern about incentivizing a pure DPS class to seek out sources of damage and make healers' lives harder in exchange for a damage boost. Even though we can filter out "standing in the fire," so to speak, and plan to do so for tank Vengeance as well, there are plenty of cases that can't be easily handled (e.g. Lei Shen's Thunderstruck, which isn't really avoidable damage, but where a warlock with the current PTR Archimonde's might find it optimal to stand just close enough that they barely survive it, rather than properly trying to get far away).

The current plan is a replacement that will make Dark Soul significantly more potent, though, of course, that is subject to change, it being PTR and all.

Archimonde's Vengeance has been redesigned and renamed into Archimonde's Darkness. Archimonde's Darkness gives the Warlock's Dark Soul spell two charges.

Soul Link now transfers 20% of damage taken by the Warlock to their pet, and 3% of all damage dealt by the Warlock will be returned as healing for the Warlock and their pet. This ability is always active while the Warlock's pet is active.

Harvest Life Affliction: Drains the life from all enemies within 15 yards of the target, causing [ 187 + 17.5% of Spell Power ] Shadow damage and restoring 3-4.5% of the caster's total health every 1 sec. Lasts 6 sec. Replaces Drain Life. Soulburn: Healing increased by 33%. Demonology: Drains the life from all enemies within 15 yards of the target, causing [ 187 + 17.5% of Spell Power ] Shadow damage and restoring 3-4.5% of the caster's total health every 1 sec. Lasts 6 sec. Replaces Drain Life. Generates 10 Demonic Fury per second plus 3 Demonic Fury per second on secondary targets.|r Destruction: Drains the life from all enemies within 15 yards of the target, causing [ 187 + 17.5% of Spell Power ] Shadow damage and restoring 3-4.5% of the caster's total health every 1 sec. Lasts 6 sec. Replaces Drain Life. Warlock - LvL 15 Talent. 1% of Base Mana, plus 1% per sec / 30 Demonic Fury, plus 30 per sec. 40 yd range. Instant (Channeled).Increases the damage of your Drain Life spell by 50% and the healing of your Drain Life spell by 150%. Warlock - LvL 15 Talent. 40 yd range.

Affliction

Soul Swap (Affliction) For 6For 3 sec afterwards, the next target you cast Soul Swap: Exhale on will be afflicted by the copied Shadow damage-over-time effects.

Soul Swap (Demonology, Destruction) For 6For 3 sec afterwards, the next target you cast Soul Swap: Exhale on will be afflicted by the copied Shadow damage-over-time effects.

Major Glyphs

Glyph of Drain Life Increases the healing of your Drain Life by 30%. Increases the healing from Harvest Life generated by your primary target by 20%. Major Glyph. Major Glyph.

Drain Soul no longer energizes Soul Shards from the pets and guardians of players, and now deals 40% less damage. If other periodic Affliction damage effects are triggered by Drain Soul, they now deal 60% of their normal damage (down from 100%).

Haunt now deals 50% more damage, and increases damage done by all of the Warlock's damage-over-time other spells against the target by 45%.

To that end, we’re going to make another change to how RPPM mechanics work on the pull. Starting a raid encounter will set every RPPM proc’s “time since last proc” to 90 seconds. That means the more frequent procs will still be more or less guaranteed to go off, but the rarer (and more powerful) procs will just have a high chance. This should hopefully chill things out a little bit, without changing how you play too dramatically.

If both the rate and effect of a proc scale with haste, we're going to remove the haste scaling from its proc rate. In these cases, we'll compensate for an expected amount of haste by increasing the base proc rate. For any procs whose effect does not scale with haste, their proc rate will continue to scale with haste as before. However, we're also revisiting the proc rate tuning on all existing procs that were made overbudget due to the addition of Unlucky Streak Prevention (which ends up increasing effective proc rate by 9%). These changes should bring RPPM procs back to being on-budget and tied with traditional ICD procs in value.

This will obviously have a noticeable effect on most players performance; don't panic. We're going to be adjusting damage/healing/tanking performance with these changes in mind.

Demonic Gateway Create a demonic gateway between two locations. Stepping into the gateway causes any party member to be instantly transported to the other gateway. Limit 5 charges. The portal generates one charge every 15 10 seconds and lasts 15 min. 10% of Base Mana. 20-70 yd range. 3 sec cast. 10 sec cooldown.

Because Warlocks had so many changes coming into Mists of Pandaria, we had to iterate on a lot of these new mechanics throughout the expansion and tried to not change things too much for Patch 5.4. We did nerf Fel Armor for the same reasons we lowered the passive damage reduction of Balance Druids, Shadow Priests, and Hunters. We increased Fel Flame’s damage but removed its DoT extension, which had become a liability for Fel Flame in PvE rather than letting it provide damage on the move as it was intended. For Affliction, we shifted more damage to DoTs and away from Malefic Grasp. Malefic Grasp is a cool spell, and we like channeling it to increase DoT damage, but we felt like too much damage had been shifted away from DoTs, which hurt Affliction in PvP and made all Affliction locks have difficulty moving. We also simplified the Soul Swap mechanic slightly by removing the glyph and the initial damage component. For Destruction, we changed Rain of Fire to not be so essential to the single-target rotation by reducing its Ember generation. We made Howl of Terror baseline for all Warlocks because we thought they had lost too much of their fear-based control package.

Our biggest challenge with Warlock talents was the level-90 tier, where most Warlocks chose Kil’jaeden’s Cunning (often to the frustration of raid leaders forced to deal with slow-moving Warlocks). We removed the snare from KJC but reduced the number of spells it affected. The talent should help with movement but not guarantee characters never need to stop moving. We buffed Mannoroth’s Fury by allowing it to increase the damage as well as radius of area-effect spells, but on a cooldown so the Warlock has more control over the effect and so it’ll feel more potent when active. We decided we could not safely balance Archimonde’s Vengeance in its “damage reflection” kit, so we redesigned and renamed the talent to emphasize the Dark Soul cooldowns (with the intent that one talent needed to be attractive in fights with no movement or area damage).

In addition to these substantial changes to the level-90 row, we wanted to buff several unattractive talents. Harvest Life never had a strong niche, so we made it improve Drain Life rather than act as an area-effect Drain Life. We replaced Howl of Terror (now baseline) with a talent inspired by the Cataclysm version of Shadowflame that many players asked for. Demonic Breath is a cone-based snare. Soul Link was also returned to an older design which is easier to use and more powerful.

Agony Inflicts increasing agony on the target, causing up to [ 3,480 + 27.3%[ 3,840 + 30% of Spell Power ] Shadow damage over 24 sec. This damage is dealt slowly at first and builds up each time it deals damage. 100 yd range. Instant.

Agony Inflicts increasing agony on the target, causing up to [ 3,480 + 27.3%[ 3,840 + 30% of Spell Power ] Shadow damage over 24 sec. This damage is dealt slowly at first and builds up each time it deals damage. Warlock - Affliction Spec. 1% of Base Mana. 40 yd range. Instant.

Drain Soul no longer energizes Soul Shards from the pets and guardians of players, and now deals 34% less damage. If other periodic Affliction damage effects are triggered by Drain Soul, they now deal 60% of their normal damage (down from 100%).

Malefic Grasp now deals 34% less damage, and causes all of the Warlock's other periodic Affliction damage effects to instantly deal 30% of their normal periodic damage (down from 50%).

Kinda hope the new Shadowflame talent reduces move speed by 70%. The cooldown is pretty long.

The Fel Armor change isn't a revert to what it used to be, right (what Xelnath used to argue?) The 'health generated' part only from Warlock's own spells? Otherwise it's a very minor (~1% nerf).

KJC/MF both being actives = huge nerfs.

Not sure why xskarma didn't post the first batch of set bonuses too but they're very interesting:

Item - Warlock T16 2P Bonus (New) Conflagrate has a 20% chance to increase the critical strike chance of Immolate and Incinerate by 15%. Unstable Affliction critical hits have a 40% chance to increase all damaging effects of Malefic Grasp and Drain Soul by 30% for 10 sec. Soul Fire has a 20% chance to increase you and your pet's damage dealt by 20%.
Item - Warlock T16 4P Bonus (New) When a Burning Ember fills up, your critical strike chance is increased by 15% for 5 sec. Haunt has a 20% chance to refund its shard when expiring. Shadow Bolt and Touch of Chaos have a 20% chance to also cast Hand of Gul'dan at the target.

[2pc] No duration on the Demo effect. Destro's looks boring. Affliction...the math will probably show it to be decent-ish but at first glance looks pretty cool.
[4pc] Affliction looks bad, Demo looks decent, Destro looks potentially amazing, I think.

For now I can't complain much about the changes. The set bonuses look nice, free howl of terror is very welcome and old shadowflame back is very nice as well.
However, removing the 10% damage reduction on fel flame is something I can absolutely not agree with, I really hope they undo that or give us a nice compensation ( old soul link pretty pretty please?)

@Rustjive, he copied what I was editing. He copied it over to this thread before I had the set bonuses added

Not happy with that KJC change, at all.
Soul leech was obvious that they where going to change.

New talent is ok, but I won't pick it because all it does is slow apparently.
Getting howl of terror baseline ? i'm ok with that!

Same CD treatment for mannoroth's fury, what ? People hardly use it as it is.
Fel armor dmg reduction taken away hurts a little, hopefully with that and the soul leech change, they won't feel the need to reduce our other survivability tools.

Ah well ... I think we needed to be brought in line as far as survivability (I can only speak from PVE perspective), but I think this goes too far. Bring down the health and healing bonuses to 5% but let us keep 5% of the damage reduction, imo : /

Or do something with Soul Leech. Argh. Really don't want to comment too much at least until the PTR is up, much less has been iterated on.

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Allright, first batch of changes on the front page, use this thread to discuss things so we have a central thread.

First changes (with thanks to Rethul ur no)

Two words: Epic fail.
* They made all three level 90 talents worthless, to match one that was already worthless. Good redesign, guys! When we're all Affliction in 5.3, don't nerf that too, unless you *want* Warlocks to go to "less played than Monks".
* Oh awesome, Soul Leech can shield me even more! Who needs movement, I'll just stand in the fire and Shadowburn spam the adds.

I saw it coming, perhaps it is better for the game in general if casters can't move while casting. Howl is baseline again? Awesome. Breath back as well? Cool. But I don't like what's happening at the 90 talents, I also don't like that they removed the dmg reduction from our fel armor, that hurts.